Tweezers and nail files

Tweezers and nail files allowed on planes again. Unkempt travelers breath sighs of relief, look forward to shapelier eyebrows.

Sure, everyone's already pointed

Sure, everyone's already pointed to the news about those damn ants in Europe. But who cares about the discovery itself? What I really want to know is: What's up with that ridiculous animated GIF next to the article?

Gee, thanks for the scientific visuals; I wouldn't have figured it out on my own. What the hell has happened to CNN? Just the other day, while reporting on the return of ousted Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, CNN Headline News titled the segment: He's Back!!!

Now that's classy.

It never fails. Every

It never fails. Every April, when the winds pick up and rush right down the wide open avenues around my apartment building, the pilot light blows out on my water heater. And so every April, I wake up one morning to find that I must either join the polar bear club or forego the shower experience altogether until PG&E can show up to relight the pilot.

As much as I enjoy showers—which is perhaps more than I should admit in a drought state like California—the mere thought of standing naked under an ice cold jet of water just makes certain appendages shrink in horror. So I called the fine people at PG&E who kindly let me know that they would drop by on Thursday and take care of my water heater. The only problem with this plan was that it was Monday. And Thursday was just not acceptable. So I took my flashlight and a box of matches and went for a little walk behind the building.

The heater is located in a dank boiler room at the back of the garage. Although I had been down there before, poking around once after I had moved in, I had forgotten about the turn-of-the-century boiler for which the room was originally built. This freakish bowl of iron hangs like a giant tarantula with countless rusting pipes for legs that jut out at odd angles and punch into the walls at random spots. It's Brobdingnagian, really. It gives me the creeps, the heebie-jeebies, the willies if you will. And if ever one of my neighbors goes missing, this is without a doubt where I’ll have the detectives look first.

The thing about relighting a water heater is that you must avoid blowing yourself up at all costs. If you should forget this rule, the six or seven warning labels on the side of the heater will help make sure you put your priorities in order.

Now, I’m sure that some of you who are lucky enough to own a home or unlucky enough to work in plumbing are reading this and thinking to yourselves, What a wimp. That may be so, but I’m not one to take gas lightly. Gas has always caused me trouble, and since I don’t have any fancy gas-detecting equipment like PG&E does, I’m not going to mess around any, that's for sure. If there’s a sticker on the side of a water heater that tells me to get on my knees and sniff around the floor for fumes, then by god, that’s what I’m going to do. And that’s what I did.

I’ll spare you the rest of the details except to say that, after you’ve taken the appropriate precautions, which include a larger insurance policy and a general outline of the life events that you’d like to have flash before your eyes in your final seconds, the act of lighting that first match is quite a spiritual one.

As it should be plain by now, I did not in the end lose my life or my appendages or my eyebrows or any other bits in a violent explosion. But I did lose some sense of innocence. I’m not talking about that sentimental innocence that people are always losing in near death experiences. I mean the sort of innocence that you only have as long as you're ignorant of your own stupidity. I mean the kind that you had back when you didn't think twice about jamming a knife into the toaster to pry out that last bit of bagel. Hot shower, or Explosion Rocks SF Neighborhood. Which will it be?

Apparently the U.S. isn't

Apparently the U.S. isn't the only country where famous people are above the law. A British jury acquitted REM guitarist Peter Buck today of charges of "going on a drunken rampage on a trans-Atlantic flight." The AP article reports:

They claimed he overturned a breakfast cart, mistook a hostess trolley for a compact disc player, claimed a stranger was his wife and tussled with crew members, covering them with yogurt.

Prosecutors said Buck drank 15 glasses of wine. British Airways crew members testified that they had to pull Buck away from an exit door after he "announced he was 'going home' mid-flight." But they were no match for REM bandmates Michael Stipe and Michael Mills, and U2 uber-celebrity Bono, who all testified that Buck is a "gentle family man." For his own perfomance, Buck claimed he had only had six glasses of wine, and said he had "suffered a bad reaction to the combination of a sleeping pill and red wine."

Six glasses of wine? That's not a defense, you jackass, that's the sign of troubles at home. Of course you had a bad reaction -- Sleeping pills and alcohol generally tend to be a bad combination, unless you're not really interested in waking up, ever. And where were all the flashy rock stars when Raho Ortiz's trip to the bathroom on an US Airways flight caused him to get jumped by three sky marshals, one with a gun drawn?

[Full disclosure: the author of this editorial has spent more money on REM concerts and CDs than he cares to admit anymore.]

Oh thank god: Mystery

Oh thank god: Mystery of Black Water off Florida Solved. (The italics below are all mine:)

A mysterious patch of black water off the Florida coast, the extent of which was detailed by satellite images, is most likely the result of a bloom of algae...

...A scientist with the Florida Marine Research Institute, said the black water bloom does not appear to be hazardous to humans, adding that the event is not likely the result of polluted river runoff or any other human or mysterious cause...

The latest satellite imagery indicates that the discolored water seems to be dissipating, the researchers said.

Well, then. Glad that's all cleared up.